ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Janet Reno

by JACK WHEELER

In light of Janet Reno’s concession of defeat in Florida’s primary elections, and as an addendum to Chris Ruddy and Carl Limbacher’s current best seller, “Catastrophe,” America needs to remember the horrific evil perpetrated by then-Attorney General Reno in the first months of the Clinton presidency.

In March of 1993, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of business and civic leaders held in Indianapolis. One of those attending was a federal judge named Joe (it’s best not to mention his last name). He seemed a nice, decent fellow who not once hinted that (as I had been informed by the organizer of the conference) he was on the short list of candidates to be the new director of the FBI. The current FBI director, William Sessions, had announced his attention to resign as soon as the recently inaugurated Bill Clinton found a replacement.

Joe and I sat together at lunch and the conversation was pleasant ? until someone at the table brought up Waco.

The ATF had assaulted the Davidian church complex a month earlier and the standoff was ensuing, with the final holocaust a month away. When I asked Joe what he thought of what was going on at Waco, his entire demeanor and body language changed, his face turned purple with rage, and he announced: “I’ll tell you what the FBI should do. Those people [the Davidians] killed federal agents. We should go in there and kill every last one of them.”

Someone responded, “There are children in there, Joe.” Joe brushed the comment aside with a wave of his hand. “You don’t understand. No one can get away with killing federal agents. They all deserve to be killed in return.”

Joe was passed over in favor of Louis Freeh, but he exemplified the mindset not just of the FBI but also of so many in law enforcement in general. As anyone who has made the mistake of arguing with a police officer giving them a traffic ticket understands, the most heinous crime anyone can commit, more evil and depraved than child molestation, is Contempt of Cop.

You know the joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. Smart-mouth a cop and you’re asking for a world of grief. Fight back and defend yourself from police action, no matter what the action is, and your life is in danger.

This is what happened at Waco. The Davidians tried to defend themselves from an armed ATF raid, set up as a pure publicity stunt to better argue for increased funding. That the raid had a flimsy pretext and was botched was irrelevant to the federal law enforcement community, however. No matter how and why, federal agents were killed and revenge had to be taken. The FBI man in charge of the siege and final death raid of April 19, Richard Rogers, thought exactly like Joe.

It is important to grasp that what happened in Waco was no accident, that the Davidians were killed on purpose in an act of revenge by the American government. And it is important to know just how they were killed, that the method of their killing was as grisly and evil as anything perpetrated by Saddam Hussein.

On the morning of April 19, 1993, the FBI smashed holes into the Davidian church complex and began pumping in a chemical warfare agent known as CS (o-chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile). It is a solid in the form of white crystals. The FBI dissolved the CS powder in an organic solvent so they could liquid spray it into the buildings.

A lot of attention has been paid to the horror of CS, but not much on the solvent. It’s called methylene chloride, MC. Ever bought paint remover and noticed the label warning to use it “only in a well-ventilated area”? That’s because it contains MC.

The effects of MC are exactly the same as those of chloroform if you use twice as much of it. When a person breathes MC (or chloroform at half the concentration) vapor he or she first becomes irritable. Second, they lose their coordination and judgment, while their vision becomes blurred. Third, they become paranoid and hyper-excitable. Fourth, they experience auditory and visual hallucinations. Fifth, they lapse into muscular paralysis and unconsciousness.

It is this fifth stage that caused surgeons to use chloroform as the first anesthetic in the 19th century. But doctors switched to ether because of uncontrollable behavior of the patients going through the first four stages ? and because of a last sixth stage. If you use only about two times as much chloroform as it takes to render someone unconscious, the patient suffers respiratory paralysis, stops breathing, and dies. It is the same with MC.

The FBI cut off the electricity to the Davidians and knew all they had

for light were kerosene lamps. Yet they sprayed into their buildings hundreds of pounds of methylene chloride, which makes people stumble around like they’re drunk, with no coordination, with blurry vision, hallucinating and excitable: a guarantee that kerosene lamps would be knocked over and fires started.

In the presence of fire, MC vapor decomposes into hydrogen chloride, which has the same effect on any moisture-laden area of the body as sulfur mustard gas used in World War I: excruciating searing pain in the eyes, the mucous lining of the nose, and the lungs.

Remember that the FBI used MC as a solvent to dissolve CS crystals. It turns out that when CS is burned, it produces hydrogen cyanide, the same gas used to execute prisoners on Death Row.

During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein discovered the most lethal chemical warfare agent was a combination of sulfur mustard gas with hydrogen cyanide, which he used in artillery shells to slaughter thousands of Iranians. It was in effect this same combination that the FBI used to slaughter 87 men, women and children in Waco.

The question is: Who authorized the CS/MC combination? CS is not normally dissolved into a solution. Who knew about MC and could order it to be a solvent for CS? Sit down, folks, and hold on tight: Janet Reno has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Chemistry from Cornell University. Cornell has a very good chemistry department. MC is used as an organic solvent for many experiments. There is no question Reno would be very familiar with it, and was informed of its dangers by her professors. Janet Reno is America’s Saddam Hussein.

Congressman Bob Barr, R-Ga., has a coroner’s photograph taken of one of the Davidian victims entitled “Doe #57.” It is of a little girl around 5 or 6 years old, her charred body burned beyond recognition and twisted in the ghastly rictus contortion typical of subjection to hydrogen cyanide.

There are few more monstrous crimes against humanity than torturing children to death in screaming pain, poison-gassing them to death on purpose. That the perpetrator of this crime wasn’t tried and executed for mass homicide, but was instead lionized by the media, served out her term of office, and came close to being elected as the Democrat nominee for the governor of Florida says something very dark about human nature.

The slaughter of American citizens by their government at Waco was dismissed by many Americans, because the people killed were “just cultists” ? like Germans who excused Nazi pogroms because the people killed were “just Jews.” As America comes to grips with the danger and evil of Saddam Hussein and gets ready to extinguish it, America also needs to come to grips with the evil it condoned at Waco.

America condoned a vast amount of depravity during the Clinton years. Yet the depravity of Waco was the worst of all. Unless expunged through public revulsion of Janet Reno, it will remain an ineradicable stain on America’s soul.